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Classical statues were not painted horribly

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Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#231

Post by fsloth »

jfengel wrote: post #95
fsloth wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the horrible version of the statues? They just look ... bad. While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though. So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project. But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest. So while hiring _a…

An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon. I'm sure you're right that reconstructions of painted statues are inaccurate. But I'm not sure that a good-looking reconstruc…

As a reference point to paintings in antique - these portraits from Roman Egypt are quite nice - from around 0 AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#232

Post by efxhoy »

marcellus23 wrote: post #199
jtr1 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been int…

> Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally If I'm understanding you right, you're suggesting the author thinks that researchers are intentionally doing poor constructions to undermine public perception of classical art as part of some sort of culture war? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this

Maybe my brain is oversaturated with culture war nonsense from too much doomscrolling but that’s where my train of thought went too, even if it wasn’t directly implied.

By claiming our ancient predecessors had terrible taste you can make them look like primitive fools, and make our own modernity appear superior in comparison.

When boiled down to culture war brainrot the poor coloring in the reconstructions becomes a woke statement that the brutish patriarchal empires of antiquity have nothing to teach our sophisticated modern selves and that new is good and old is bad. A progressive hit-piece on muh heritage.

Anything you don’t like is a purple haired marxist if you squint hard enough.

Idk why my brain went there. I’m guessing the years of daily exposure to engagement-farming ragebait had something to do with it.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#233

Post by 20k »

dddgghhbbfblk wrote: post #226
wisty wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed. The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle. I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. th…

They're making it up no matter what they do, since we don't know how these things were originally painted and have no way of knowing. They should just present the reconstructions as interpretations and actually try to do a good job painting them. I agree with the article that what they're doing now is harmful to the public understanding.

I mean, we kind of do though? We could assume that the surviving images of statues showing how they were painted are accurate. If you know the colour of the underlayer, this actually lets you determine exactly what the colouration of the paint on top of that is despite it not being present whatsoever

This gives you a general trend of how brightly underlayed statues tended to be painted afterwards to finish them, and lets you infer how other statues without surviving coloured pictures of them would have appeared based on the likely prevailing style at the time

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#234

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #155
nyeah wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but medieval European art generally sucked. (Call this a hypothesis if that helps.) Compare the damn cave paintings of buffalo to most medieval European art. Some of the 10k-year-old stuff is much better observed. Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint. I'm sorry about that. It's just not always taste. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes people are bad at making art.

So were the Japanese better at painting circa the 1700s and 1800s? Because you got a whole lot of paints of, uhhh, octopi…

Octopuses or octopodes. Octopi is incorrect.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#235

Post by bgnn »

buescher wrote: post #14

I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by mor…

And fermented shrimp paste and fish sauce are a thing in pretty much whole southeast Asia. Garum isn't too different.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp_paste

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#236

Post by [deleted] »

smallnix wrote: post #96
wongarsu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"trolling" in this instance seems to be a nicer way of saying "misleading to create attention". It's hard to deny that "look at how garish these beautiful statures originally looked" created a lot more attention than a theoretical "Roman statues looked pretty nice, but with paint" It's an unsubstantiated theory, but the author does go out of their way to say that this might not even be objectionable, if it happened a…

And an article "experts are trolling public" creates more attention than "experts stick to evidence and aren't artists"

[deleted]

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#237

Post by orthoxerox »

johndhi wrote: post #42
Geonode wrote: post #28

I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer stuck to the statues, and the rest was washed away. This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject. Painters layer paint, starting with a saturated base color. These archaeologists are sim…

Makes sense. This is basically how skilled painters of miniatures (Warhammer) do it.

Yeah, these reconstructions look like tournament-grade paintjobs.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#238

Post by peacebeard »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #82
numlocked wrote: post #3

Good read! The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best. > Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? > ...may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only…

> The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best. Have you seen medieval art though? https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/explaining-weird-mediaeva... The technique is quite different from the "old masters" of later periods that we often think of as fine art.

Medieval art isn't comparable to a 10 year old's paint by numbers kit either. As seen in your link, they understood how to use shading for light and shadow for example.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#239

Post by sapphicsnail »

marcellus23 wrote: post #199
jtr1 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been int…

> Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally If I'm understanding you right, you're suggesting the author thinks that researchers are intentionally doing poor constructions to undermine public perception of classical art as part of some sort of culture war? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this

> The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling.

It's towards the end of the article. He doesn't directly mention culture war stuff but he does talk about it being "iconoclastic." I think it's a reasonable interpretation of what he was saying.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#240

Post by the_af »

eudamoniac wrote: post #125
the_af wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure whether they look "bad" is enough justification. The author dismisses the possible explanation "maybe they didn't consider this bad style back then" without any real argument other than "there are other works of art with different styles". I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a paint…

I believe it is basically irresponsible to present the statues with their base layers only. Either extrapolate the aesthetic top layers that might have been there, or just report that the statues were painted without a visual example. Presenting them as poorly as they do contributes to demoralization and a sense of alienation from one's own cultural roots.

I believe researchers are under pressure not to extrapolate too wildly, unless they can find strong evidence for their extrapolations. In TFA itself they are quoted (very briefly) saying this is not a representation of what the statues actually looked like, it's just the pigments they guaranteed were there.

> Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.

Consider that had they gone wild with creativity, they would have been criticized for it. Apparently the current overcautious trend is an (over)reaction to previous careless attitudes in archeology.

This is my uninformed take, anyway. I think TFA's author should have engaged more directly with researchers instead of speculating about their motives; the article -- while making some interesting points -- reads a bit snarky/condescending to me. Why not go straight to the source and ask them?

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